Your
Etymological Queries Answered

From Susan Rollins:

I am a college
student taking a paralegal program and in my Introduction to Business class,
my professor has asked us to research the origin of the word cash.
Why do we use it when we talk about money or currency? Where did this
word come from?

It was either the French or the Italians who
gave English this word - it was casse in French and cassa in
Italian. Both meant "money box", but they had come to refer
also to the money itself by the time English borrowed the word in the 16th
century. Those Romance languages got casse/cassa from
Latin capsa "box". English lost the "money
box" meaning in the 18th century and kept only the "money"
meaning, so that now we hear the term cash box, which is etymologically
redundant! Capsa derives from capere "to hold",
which also gave English capsicum "genus of peppers" (1644)
and capsule (1652), among others. Capsicum is usually
explained as referring to the pepper fruit being a "case" for its
seeds, though Linnaeus said that it came from Greek kapteo "to
bite". The active, or "hot", ingredient in peppers is
called capsaicin.

From Carolyn Devine:

I would like to
know the origin of hullabaloo. I suspect it may be from
another language, and it may be connected with carnival.

Though no one knows for sure, this word is
thought to derive from halloo/hullo, the source of hello, with
the balloo portion being a rhyming reduplication. It first
appears in writings from Scotland and the north of England and did not take
its current form until the 20th century. The first form in the written
record is hollo-ballo from 1762. The meaning has always been
"tumultuous noise" or "commotion". There is the
suggestion that the baloo part is related to baloo "a
lullaby word", deriving from the phrase bas le loup, supposedly
part of an old French lullaby. This sounds a bit iffy to us, as no one
seems able to find this lullaby or explain why there is a wolf in it (loup
means "wolf").

Another source
claims that hullabaloo was the Irish word for "wailing at
funerals", but again, there is no evidence to support this.

From Allysa:

What is the origin of titanic?

Why the Titans, of course! In
Greek mythology they were the six sons and six daughters of Uranus, god of the
heavens, and Gea, goddess of the earth. We mentioned Tantalus, last
week, as being one of the Titans. He was descended from one of these 12
original Titans.

The six sons were thrown into Tartarus by their
father, Uranus. As a result, Gea persuaded her daughters, the Titan
women, to rise against
Uranus. They dethroned their father, liberated their banished
brothers, and raised one of themselves (Cronus) as ruler of the world amid
much sibling feuding. Eventually, Cronus sired Zeus,
after having swallowed all of Zeus' preceding siblings for fear one of them
would dethrone him, as had been foretold. Zeus' mother slipped Cronus
a stone wrapped in cloth and escaped with her child. When he was grown, he was reunited with his brothers and sisters
after Cronus was given a potion that made him regurgitate his swallowed
children. It was then that the Titanomachia, or the war between Zeus
and the ruling Titans, began.

Why did these
mythological figures give their name to a word meaning "huge in
size"? The Titans were giants (being a child of gods and all
tends to do that to one). The word was first used to mean
"colossal" in 1709.

From James Wooten:

Why is the letter y
called a "wye"? In most European languages, this letter is
called either ipsilon or "the Greek I", reflecting
its origin as a Greek letter borrowed into Latin. One would expect
that if English departed from this tradition, it would use a name based on
the letter's sound. The name "wye", which cannot be
explained either way, seems strange to me..

The Romans imported the Greek letter upsilon
, and the letter was then passed on in the Roman alphabet. Upsilon was
an altered form of the ancient letter V (from which we also get the
modern U and V). When adopted as V, it expressed
the sounds of u and w. When adopted as Y, it
expressed the upsilon found in some Greek words adopted by Latin
(e.g. asylum).

You're correct about "Greek I" being the name given to
the letter in French and Spanish, and ipsilon being the German,
Italian and Portuguese name of the letter. The derivation of the
English name "wy" is not known with certainty. There is a
grammatical treatise of 1150 which calls the "Greek Y" ui,
something that might explain the English name of the letter. A quote
from 1573 makes a similar suggestion:

Y hath bene taken for a greeke vowel among our
latin Grammarians a great while, which me thinke if we marke well we shall
finde to be rather a diphthong: for it appeareth to be compounded of u
and i, which both spelled together soundeth as we write "wy".

The letter represented by modern-day y goes all the way back to
Old English, where it expressed the i-mutation of u.
Interestingly, the y used to be dotted, to distinguish it from
another letter of runic origin which later fell into disuse.

When the Latin alphabet was adopted for use
in English, in the 7th century, a letter was needed to represent the
"w" sound that Latin had not possessed. The Roman U
or V (basically the same letter to them, and interchanged in
English for some time, too) was closest to the English
"w" sound, but using simply a U or V would have
been too confusing. Therefore, two V's (also known as "yous")
were employed: vv.
By the 8th century, however, a rune was adopted to represent thew
in England, yet the vv had caught on in German and French
writing. The Norman invaders of England (in the 11th century)
reintroduced the vv, now joined in what is called a ligature,
as w, and by the 13th century it had completely replaced its runic
equivalent in England. It never lost its "double u" name,
from England to France and back again.

Interestingly,
as an aside, mispronouncing an r as a w, usually considered
a speech defect, has actually been fashionable in the past! Today we
notice a subtle form of the w-for-r phenomenon, mostly in
non-rhotic English speakers (i.e., speakers who do not pronounce final r's,
such as the English). You can just detect it in the speech of Terry
Jones, well-known for his work with Monty Python, now a creator of films
and documentaries (although he's Welsh, he's got what is mostly an English
accent; Welsh-speakers tend to be rhotic).